Homelessness

Chris Ruane: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what estimate he has made of the number of homeless people in each (a) local authority area and (b) Parliamentary constituency in each of the last 20 years.

Mark Prisk: The Department publishes statistics on homelessness for England. Figures for the other UK countries are a matter for the devolved Administrations. I have placed in the Library of the House, two tables setting out the numbers of households accepted by local housing authorities as eligible for assistance, unintentionally homeless and in priority need, and therefore owed a main homelessness duty (to ensure that suitable accommodation is available) for each local authority area and for each financial year from 1997-98 to 2011-12. One table covers the period 1997-98 to 2008-09 and the other one covers the period following local government restructuring, from 2009-10 to 2011-12. This information has been collected from local authorities on quarterly P1E returns.
	Figures at local authority level for earlier years are not readily available: some may be available from paper returns, but only at disproportionate cost.
	Quarterly figures for recent years are also available from the Department's website at:
	http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/homelessnessstatistics/publicationshomelessness
	The available figures for numbers of people estimated or counted as rough sleepers within each local authority area from 1998 to 2011 are published on the Department's website at:
	http://www.communities.gov.uk/housing/housingresearch/housingstatistics/housingstatisticsby/homelessnessstatistics/roughsleepingcounts
	Please note that the methodology involved was reviewed and changing during 2010, meaning that figures for 2010 and 2011 are not comparable with those for earlier years.
	The Department does not collect or publish information on the number of homeless people in individual parliamentary constituencies, except for the few cases where a constituency is coterminous with the area of a local authority, which are covered in the answer above.
	Homelessness acceptances remain lower than in 28 of the last 30 years and are still under half the level it reached under the Labour Government (49,000 in 2011 compared with 136,000 in 2003).
	We are investing £3900 million in homelessness prevention over four years 2011-12 to 2014-15). We provided an additional £70 million last year to help local agencies prevent and tackle homelessness.